So, they really DO things differently in
Texas...As I mentioned
earlier
I am the recipient of a shiny new Ti89 and have been trying
to get to know it. My main pocket calculator for [ahem]
years, bought when I was studying for my M.Sc., was a Casio
fx-3600P and I could use it almost blindfolded. If I had to
make the leap from that one to the Ti89 I would be
struggling as back in the days of yore calculators appeared
to be more stack-based and so pressing
<SIN> would
give you the sine of the value
on the display. Due
to the
LCD-leaking death of the fx-3600P I acquired a fx-115W with
much the same capabilities but, being more than a decade
newer, it now used what Casio modestly called
Super
Visually Perfect Algebraic Method which means you
have to type everything like it appears in the textbook, or
suffer painfully (thank goodness for some basic editing
options). The Ti89 is like this, only more so. The main
gotcha I have encountered so far is that unary minus
has a lower priority than almost all other
operations(!) Bizarre! When looking at a negative
number I expect it to be atomic but the Ti89 treats the sign as
some kind of function and it fails the dictum of least
surprises as it is not followed by a parenthesis, like most
of the other built-in functions. When you stare in
wonderment after entering
-3^2 and seeing the
answer
-9 you immediately have that sinking feeling
that whole new vistas of misinterpretation and debugging are
opening up. Is there any other language or machine that
treats a unary minus in this manner?